To Honduras!

This has been very interesting, being without my computer for a week. I have two computers to work on, but they are old and range from rather to extremely slow, and the stuff they have on them is my stuff, but it is more than two years old. And in today's fast-flowing information world two-year-old stuff is like prehistory.

So when my laptop took an unexpected bath and went black, it took all my photos and blog files with it. And only Wednesday afternoon was I able to send it to Apple, and here it is Thursday and you are hoping for a post.

I had two major articles to produce this week, and one of them was about birding and travel in Honduras. So with great trepidation I hooked up my external hard drive to my old desk computer and began to drag more than 2,000 photos around where I could see them. It took three hours for the thumbnails to load so I could see what I had, then about ten to twenty seconds for each one I selected to open. Two days later, I had my best photos selected for the article. All the while I was waiting to see my stuff (which I could have seen instantly on my laptop, had it not been dead as a donut), I was writing the article and sidebar.

And I thought, well, maybe this is a sign from the cosmos that I should do some long-overdue blogging about that trip to Honduras in February 2009. (I can hear Tim Ryan squeeing from here). It's going to be interesting, blogging about a trip that happened that long ago. Maybe the mists of time will refine my observations, cook them down like fine brandy. Maybe I won't remember squat. The browser on this machine is so old that it doesn't support "Compose" mode, so I can't even see my photos before they post. So I'll have to put them in in html code, one at a time. And that is awesome.

The man in olive drab in the foreground talking to peerless Yucatanense guide David Bacab in yellow is the energetic, talented and thoroughly delightful Corey Finger of 10,000 Birds blog. What a gas to be with him on his first foray to the Neotropics! I am all about enthusiasm, and Corey bubbles over with it. He nearly hurts himself trying to see everything all at once. We're all standing around on the balcony of Hotel Las Glorias on beautiful Lake Yojoa in east-central Honduras, having made our way from all over the world to be here. It's POURING. So we're subjecting our laptops to extreme humidity, something I seem to be bound to do over and over again in my super-saturated life. And hoping it lets up enough to let us see a frickin' oriole already. Well, eventually it did.

I have to warn you that I was in extreme turista mode the whole trip, taking pictures of every little thing that amused me. Like this peeing sombrero-totin' plaster putti (or maybe the singular is putto?) at Hotel Las Glorias. I'm sorry, but in America, we would describe this sculpture as "icky." But we're not in America.

Eventually it cleared enough for me to be outside my room, which looked pretty awesome from the outside, but was tres basique inside. That's OK. The only time I spent there in my twin bed under the single naked 40-watt light bulb was when I was dead to the world. There was so much to discover!

The food was good at Hotel Las Glorious, though I must admit this dish, a whole deep-fried tilapia, was a little off-putting even to a carnivore like me. I kept thinking of Shila, who won't eat "anything with a face." Well. When in Honduras...

After the hard, snowy winter of 2008-2009, the colors in Honduras literally stung my eyes. Good Lord!

I couldn't get enough of the view of Lake Yojoa. And in the reeds along the edge were wattled jacanas, green herons, little blue and tri-colored herons, blue-winged teal, hidden rails, common moorhens...it was just seething with life. I saw an otter, too!

One of the very cool things about this familiarization trip was the inclusion of one Robert Ridgely, author of Birds of Panama, a book I practically memorized as a college student, and now author of the multi-volume Birds of South America. Lord. He's a lovely man, on top of all that encyclopedic knowledge of birds of Latin America, and he was trying hard to lure some kinda crake (Ruddy?) out of the reeds for me, but all I baggged was a nice conversation and this shot of him, albeit a little cock-eyed. I'd straighten it, but I can't on this computer...blaaa, whatever. Onward.It was very cool to finally be able to tell Bob what his work has meant to me.

Bob Ridgely in paradise. How do you like them bougainvilleas? Sight for tired eyes, no? I can foresee a day when I might snap and suddenly need to live somewhere I can grow a 15' high bougainvillea in my yard. As the cold, rainy 40-degree weather drags on here in Ohio for yet another week, it's nice to make a little escape to Honduras. Why not?